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Damned SummerL.A.’s cinematic landscape finally feels boundless with the addition of Locarno in Los Angeles, now in their second year. For its second edition, beginning Thursday at the Downtown Independent, the festival—curated by Acropolis Cinema founder Jordan Cronk and co-artistic director Robert Koehler—is focusing on award-winning films from Switzerland’s 70th Locarno Festival. The program includes opening night selection Ilian Metev’s 3/4 (Filmmakers of the Present Golden Leopard), Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias’ Cocote (Signs of Life Award), and Wang Bing’s Mrs. Fang (International Competition Golden Leopard). Locarno in L.A. includes 14 nonfiction and narrative films and 5 shorts, including this year’s centerpiece film, Ben Russell’s Good Luck. Shot on 16mm film, the documentary follows two mining communities: one, a government-owned copper mine in Bor, Serbia, operating 400m underground where dank darkness pervades. At the other, in the Brokopondo district of Suriname, laborers...

This year at the Locarno Festival I am looking for specific images, moments, techniques, qualities or scenes from films across the 70th edition's selection that grabbed me and have lingered past and beyond the next movie seen, whose characters, story and images have already begun to overwrite those that came just before.***The astrologic and the catastrophic in Gürcan Keltek’s Meteors (Filmmakers of the Present). Like Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light, this poetic documentary finds deeply painful but also awesome connection between cosmic phenomenon and a nation’s internal bloodshed: the occurrence in 2015 of a meteor shower over Turkey at a time of martial law and violent repression of the Kurds. In beautifully grainy video, the luminous streaks across the night sky rhyme with and contrast against the gunfire and smoke of the government action. Cell phones record the bullet scars on the buildings, virtual evidence of material tragedy,...